Bon Appetit

I like Curtis Sittenfeld's novels.  Prep is probably the best of them but I also really liked American Wife and Sisterland.  (Here's what I don't like: Book titles in italics.  Why, MLA?  Why? Did you think that underlined titles would look too much like hyperlinks?  Well, maybe that's a legitimate concern, actually.  I keep lightly swiping my index finger across the paper page of the actual, real, hardcover book that I'm reading now, and expecting a new page to load.)  In Sisterland, 12-year-old twin sisters take over the family cooking after their chronically depressed mother takes permanently to her bed.  The girls find three recipes, and they rotate among them, never varying the recipes, cooking and serving one of the three dishes every day until they leave for college years later.  Hard up for dinner ideas one night, I actually tried one of the recipes (pork chops in orange juice.)  I'm sure that Curtis Sittenfeld didn't intend to write a cookbook, but there you are.  Give me a cautionary tale, and I'll take it as a helpful hint.  I usually prefer the before picture.

So right now, I'm waiting for frozen meat and cheese ravioli to defrost. My 10-year-old has been collecting recipes from a series of books about the states, and the Missouri book's recipe was something called "St. Louis Toasted Ravioli."  Never mind my surprise that any sort of ravioli dish is a St. Louis local favorite.  I'm once again all out of dinner ideas, and a fried ravioli recipe copied onto an index card from a dusty school library book seems like just as good an idea as anything I'd dig up on Cooks.com.  None of us are particularly hungry today, anyway. 

*****

The hardcover book is a used copy of Jean Kerr's Please Don't Eat the Daisies. I like it.  I like the wisecracking snappy mid-century humor, and I love the utter lack of introspection or gritty honesty.  I'm sure that Jean Kerr's life as the wife of a famous and probably demanding drama critic and the mother of his six children was probably harder than she makes it seem, and I'm sure that she had moments of frustration and anger and resentment, but I'm glad that she kept that part to herself.  I'm glad that she occasionally mentions feeding her children, but that she offers no insight whatsoever regarding what exactly she fed them, and why.  Jean Kerr makes me a little nostalgic for a time that I just missed.  

*****

My ravioli are probably thawed now.  I'm going to follow my 10-year-old's instructions, and we'll see what happens.  Maybe I have some pork chops in the freezer.  I always have orange juice. 

Illuminate the main streets and the cinema aisles

Isn't it so much easier and more pleasant to clean your kitchen when you have music to listen to?  I forget this sometimes, but I remembered it tonight, and the nightly dishes and counters routine was much more pleasant as a result.

I skipped around a bit on my husband's old iPod, landing first on The Brothers Johnson's "Strawberry Letter 23", followed by Al Stewart's "Time Passages". Then I found Cornershop's "Brimful of Asha", and listened to it three times.

So many reasons to love "Brimful of Asha". I'm an Indio-Anglophile, if such a thing exists.  Years of working with Indian scientists and software engineers left me with great affection for Indians, who seem to combine razor-sharp wit with kindness like few other cultures can.  Even better than Indian Americans are Indian Brits (or British Indians?)  Because they're BRITISH AND INDIAN.

I like to think that "Brimful of Asha" probably gave at least one record company executive heartburn when he first heard it.  It's a longer-than-five-minutes song about a Bollywood star, and Indian sociopolitics, and life in late-20th-century England, with vaguely Indian melody and instrumentation.  Who would have expected it to be a huge hit? I fell in love with this song the first time I heard it in 1996, and it's held up beautifully.

I'm listening now to Toad the Wet Sprocket's "Nanci".  If only I could bend my words like Uri Geller's spoons.

Or maybe not...

Would the first 1,000 words of 50 different novels work just as well as one 50,000-word novel? By the way, all of the words would be dialogue.

What was I Thinking? (Part 10 Million)

So I sat and stewed over a title for this post for at least 5 minutes, but that's no reason to think that I shouldn't be able to write a 50,000-word novel in a month, right? National Novel Writing Month starts tomorrow, and I'm in.

I'm Egg-sellent

That's a mixed metaphor, I suppose, because I refer to MS Excel, and not to the scrambled, fried, or poached product of a chicken.  So sue me.

I start my new job on November 3. Who else can say that she got the first job in her field that she applied to after graduating? Yes, I graduated at age 48, but my advanced age only slightly diminishes the magnitude of this accomplishment. Write that down. 

I'm actually 49 now.  This is when people start to worry about their minds (having long despaired of their bodies, I suppose) and I'm not immune to those worries.  If you have ever worked as a government contractor, then you know that the upside is that you can always find a job if you need to.  The downside (wait for it) is that you almost always need to.  Now, though, I have to worry about more than just finding a new job.  I have to worry about my brain's ability to keep up with brains half its age.  Cloud computing!  New forms of social media every damn day!  Windows 8.1! Sometimes, I'm pugnaciously upbeat, like one of those aggressively active seniors in a Medicare supplement commercial.  Sometimes, though, I descend into Luddite crotchetiness.  That's a word, because I say it is.  

Today, I'm an active senior, adjusting my fanny pack and mall-walking circles around these damn kids. I remembered how to create formulas in Excel, and I...

...am bitch-slapped by irony, once again.  That last paragraph, abandoned mid-sentence, was supposed to be a boast about how I mastered Windows 8.1 in less than 24 hours, and then, my keyboard abruptly refused to produce output to match my input. I'm sure that I must have hit something by accident.  I had to resort to the help desk first line of defense. Now that the computer has been turned off and back on again, it appears to be fine. My nerves are a little frayed, but you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. 

Technological advances

I have a new computer, and it's beautiful.  I might have to start blogging again.  It takes so little.

Quotidian, Part 75

I was supposed to write today, wasn’t I?  I made a commitment to write daily, but “daily” is looking alarmingly frequent now.  What was I thinking?  

Well, there’s a four-word autobiography if I ever saw one, but that’s a story for another day.  Time to make dinner. "Daily" is a harsh and insistent taskmaster. 

Drosophila

What's the life span of a fruit fly again?  A day? 4 days?  Anyway, it's short.  I feel like I should remember this in better detail after months of study for the CLEP exam but everything I ever learned about biology escaped my sieve-like skull the moment I walked out of the testing center.

I could look it up, couldn't I? But I won't.  The point is that they were in my kitchen, just a handful of them, buzzing around some slightly overripe bananas that I moved to the refrigerator, depriving them of what I hope was their sole major food source.  I talked to them about their certain impending death (not likely from starvation; my kitchen is clean but it's not perfect.)  How long does life feel to something that small that lives for such a short time?  Assuming that it's aware of its life at all, do the minutes feel like days?   "You'll be dead by tomorrow anyway; Friday at the latest," I told the little gang's leader as I announced my decision to spare their lives. 

Curiosity and the desire not to look foolish (almost always too late in my case) drove me to look it up anyway.  Turns out that they can live for a month or more.   The stays of execution may have been too hasty.  No one knows the day or hour, right?  The little bastards could outlive me. 

Summertime Weirdness

It’s Friday night. Friday nights have a different rhythm, a different atmosphere, depending on the time of year.  This is summer, so Friday night means pasta dinner at the pool pavilion, followed by pool set-up for tomorrow’s meet, followed by TV time on the couch with the kids.  An early bedtime tonight for an early warm-up tomorrow morning; a pool filled with sleepy swimmers at 7:30 AM.

It’s very green here now.  We had six months of winter, a few weeks of chilly spring, barely warmed by thin pale yellow sunlight, and now lush overripe warmth—things growing on almost every surface, black mottling on the pavement that might be dirt or might be mold.  Nothing in the swampy close-in suburbs of Washington D.C. will be really dry again until October.

Our neighborhood is filled with monster trees, 50 or more years old, 30 or more feet tall.   A sheltering, cooling canopy that could end up crushing your house--thunderstorms here are Old Testament. We belong to one of the mid-20^th century swim and tennis clubs that are hidden in neighborhoods throughout D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.  I picture myself sometimes, old and alone, clinging to dim memories of a distant and happy oasis: smiling neighbors, striped deck chairs, blue water sparkling with sunlight, ceiling fans spinning lazily in the redwood pavilion.  When I’m tired of my slightly down-at-the heels Levitt neighborhood, it’s the pool that keeps me away from the real-estate listings.

Summer just started, really, and I’m already worried about losing it. Fleeting isn’t the word. A blink and it’s over. How not to waste it, how not to lose it, how not to worry about the regret I’ll feel at the end of August, barely two months from now. We should have eaten more popsicles, should have gone to the Air and Space museum, should have chased fireflies. 

I live in the moment. It's just the wrong moment.  

The lane ropes are in place and the backstroke flags are strung across the pool, where we hope they’ll stay (a thunderstorm threatens, as usual.) The sun will be in my eyes tomorrow as I try to look serious in my blue and white stroke-and-turn judge uniform.  The meet will be over, a blink, and I’ll know that there are only a few left, even though the season is just starting.  I miss it already. 

Summa Cum Laude

After 7 years, I am finally finished.  I walked across the stage at Comcast Center on May 17.  I heard "Summa Cum Laude" after my name was called.  I shook Javier Miyares' hand, and a bit later, I moved my tassel from right to left, along with 1,000 or so other graduates of University of Maryland University College.  

I thought that I’d make a bigger deal of graduating.  It still doesn't feel real. I still feel like I face a long struggle toward a distant goal, and I suppose I do.  I just don’t know what the goal is now.   In an entirely predictable instance of careful-what-you-wish-for, I’m actually a little depressed that the whole ordeal is over.  What to do now?  

I hung up my gown and my honor cord and my Phi Kappa Phi medal, and I'll wait for the university to mail my diploma later this summer.  I lost the tassel in the parking lot. 

A Message for Rafael

I'm watching "Being There", for the first time.  How is it that I never saw this before, and how is possible for a movie to be hilariously funny and almost too sad to watch, both at the same time?

That's not all that needs examining

Weeks (no, months) of filling my head with phosphate groups and Punnett squares and all sorts of other things that really don't belong there, and the CLEP exam has been cancelled because of the (stupid and stinky) weather forecast.  I'm rescheduled for March 6, which means three more weeks of waking up in the middle of the night screaming "The homozygous recessive expresses the trait!  36 molecules of ATP!"

If I were actually capable of learning Biology, this wouldn't be such an extinction-level event for me.  I'd just enjoy the snow day tomorrow and plan for an unpleasant morning on March 6...no worse than root canal (which isn't that bad, by the way). Sadly for me, though, I have no aptitude for science whatsoever.  I'm good at passing tests, and so my efforts have been focused on memorizing just enough to get me through the exam. I have absolutely no hope of retaining any of this unless I continue to beat it into my cement-like skull every day.

Onward.  The Protists survived their demotion from Kingdom status, so I'll live through this.  Meanwhile, maybe male fruit flies will eventually learn sexual responsibility and then we won't need to worry about how many of their 112 offspring are heterozygous for red eyes.

This Just In

In other news, winter would have continued for at least another 6 weeks anyway.